


Five times

by aeryn_sun



Category: Cardinal (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Mostly Fluff, Sudden angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25190920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeryn_sun/pseuds/aeryn_sun
Summary: Just a very short piece of fluff. Yes, that needs a companion piece ;-)Well, apparently there *is* a companion piece. And it's not very fluffy. At all.
Relationships: John Cardinal & Lise Delorme, John Cardinal/Lise Delorme
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Lise tells Cardinal she loves him is the first night they spend together. She’s chock full of emotion and he's peacefully sleeping. She studies his face, light fingers exploring and she whispers ‘God I love you’, before pressing a kiss on the arm wrapped possessively around her. She wipes the tear threating to fall from her eyes, extricates herself and sneaks out for a smoke.

The second time, it slips out when she’s up from Toronto and they’re lazily making love in the morning. And in between gasping his name, she says - moans - it again, but she’s so far gone, she barely realizes she’s said it. John does and it makes him bury himself deep inside of her and the feeling of finally coming home spreads through him as he cradles her and the wave of affection coursing through him pushes him over the edge.

The third time is when she leaves a message on his voicemail that she’s running late and needs to book a suspect and it might get late. “Don’t wait up, babe. Love you!” Cardinal listens to it, standing dumbstruck as a smile spreads out from his lips to his eyes in the middle of the dairy aisle at the grocery store until an old lady asks him to move out of the way.

The fourth time is in broad daylight. She’s getting ready to head back, she’s all packed, but her heart is breaking at the separation. He pulls her in for a hug, running a gentle hand over her hair as her head nestles itself against his shoulder. “I love you.” She whispers into his wool sweater, heart full. She’s not sure he heard her and looks up to find his eyes shining with wonder and amazement and his hand moves to cradle her cheek.

The fifth time, he’s at her apartment, doing the dishes and she wraps her arms around him from behind, resting her head against him, hand resting over his heart and his own reaches up to cover hers. They stay like this, for the longest time, before he turns around. And the fifth time, she doesn’t need to tell him, he can read it in her eyes, no longer holding back how deeply she feels.


	2. John

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the companion piece. Only ... I don't know where this came. It's like ... from a different ... planet? Genre? I honestly don't know how this turned out so freaking angsty.

Cardinal is the kind of man that loves a woman and tells her, seriously, earnestly, no frills and it's simple and quiet. But for the life of him, somehow he can't seem to find the words. It's just too much - somehow almost beyond his comprehension just what he feels for his partner. They have been colleagues, partners, friends for such a long time - and there has always been that underlying feeling between them. Trust. Trust that had been forged in fire, in that first case. Even then, their relationship was complicated. _Should_ have been complicated. But perhaps it was just complex, many-layered. And in the end, it was him and her and whatever was between them, just was. He'd figured that that was what it was - they were partners. They had to trust each other with their lives and he had never thought it strange, that he did not feel this with Szelagy or McLeod or even Dyson. He never thought about the bond between them. _It_ just was.

It had taken him longer than he cared to admit that _it_ was something. Even when she had told him that she had taken the job in Toronto, he kept trying to chalk that off as his reaction to his partner leaving. He _needs_ her. But he also starts to realize that _it_ is more than that. And when she asks him inside and the way his stomach drops at the way she looks at him at her door, yes, _it_ is definitely something. Something he doesn’t have the words for, yet, because it’s too much and he’s losing her. And he’s not sure if he’s afraid of losing his colleague, his partner, his best friend, the person who knows him best, the person who has been through so much with him he would trust her, deaf, blind and mute. Or _Lise_. Lise, who is all of that … but so much more.

On the drive up from Toronto after they … well, _after_ , it’s on the tip of his tongue, but his feelings get in the way again. It’s all too much and words are not enough to explain everything he is thinking and feeling. She’s his partner, his best friend and she’s _leaving_. And he doesn’t want to stand in her way, because she’s brilliant and he _loves_ her. He _loves_ her and he can’t tell her, not now. Because if he does, he will beg her to stay and he _loves_ her too much to ask her to do that for him when she can have a career and maybe someone her age and without his baggage in Toronto. So he stays quiet, but he can hear the way her heart is spilling over with questions in just the way she breathes next to him in the car on the drive up, in the way she hugs him goodbye and holds onto him tight as he labors for those _damn_ words. Because telling her he loves her? It's just not enough. 

The fourth time, it is she who tells him, before she has to leave again for Toronto. They have started to settle in some kind of them and he’d been thinking it in the way her name crossed his mind. _Lise_. It was in everything she did, in the way she gasped his name and in the way she left him messages and he knew with certainty now. And he put his feelings into everything he did – in the way he kissed her, in the way he made love to her, in the way he would smile at her over coffee and the Sunday crossword. But when she told him, he was floored. For some reason, he had been so preoccupied with putting into words how _he_ felt that somehow, when she tells him, his eyes well up and he’s _so_ incredibly overwhelmed and elated that he doesn’t realize he doesn’t reciprocate.

When he gets the call from her partner in Toronto, he’s out of the station and Southbound in his Camry in less than three minutes. “Lise Delorme asked me to call you. She’s in surgery. She’s been shot.” His heart had dropped and he was frantic, racing down the highway and he couldn’t have said how he’d made it or how long it had taken. “She’s in recovery. Are you family?” He doesn’t remember if he answered or not and spends hours pacing the hallway. When she’s finally brought to her room, eyes closed and pale and hooked up to IVs, the steadily beeping monitors do nothing to calm him. He doesn’t hear anything the doctor’s tell him, the only thing he knows is that she’s alive and that he loves her. He sits by her bedside, holding her hand and when her eyes are finally fluttering open, he's passed out from exhaustion, his head resting by her thigh still clutching her hand to his lips and she wakes him when she’s softly scratching his beard. “Lise?” he rasps “I love you.” She smiles faintly. “I know, baby. Love you too.”


End file.
